Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge The Secrets of Dirty Money

About two years ago, a whistleblower had already sold internal Mossack Fonseca data to the German authorities, but the dataset was much older and smaller in scope: while it addressed a few hundred offshore companies, the Panama Papers provide data on some 214,000 companies. In the wake of the data purchase, last year investigators searched the homes and offices of about 100 people. The Commerzbank was also raided. As a consequence of their business dealings with Mossack Fonseca, Commerzbank, HSH Nordbank, and Hypovereinsbank agreed to pay fines of around 20 million euros, respectively. Since then, other countries have also acquired data from the initial smaller leak, among them the United States, the UK, and Iceland.

Everyone knows banks are too big to fail

Seems there are pretty high failure rates when it comes to prosecuting banks:

Of course there is a high failure rate it prosecuting banks

• They have more and better lawyers than any government
• The banks own enough legislators to stifle any concerted government effort to regulate them

What you say is true but the banks are just a few of the players in the nearly quarter million companies involved. The bulk of those "companies" are shells used by wealthy individuals and corporations to avoid paying their share of the tax load. They are abetted by a phalanx of tax lawyers and accountants.

When that happens, the rest of us are left to pick up the slack with higher personal taxes.

The Panama Papers, IMHO, are an example of leakers working in the common good and, quite frankly, I hope that any resulting investigations motivate them to do more. It's about time the cover was pulled from the activities of some in the "One Percent".